


Another Ending

by thegenuineimitation



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Female Harry Potter, Fidelius Charm (Harry Potter), First War with Voldemort, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Marauders Friendship (Harry Potter), Mentor Albus Dumbledore, Mentor Minerva McGonagall, Multi, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:09:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27587264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegenuineimitation/pseuds/thegenuineimitation
Summary: In which Gwyn Potter dies and wakes up...in the Forbidden Forest...in 1977.
Relationships: Albus Dumbledore & Harry Potter, Harry Potter & James Potter & Lily Evans Potter, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin & Peter Pettigrew & James Potter, Sirius Black/Harry Potter
Comments: 26
Kudos: 272





	1. Death is Only Another Path

She lay with her cheek against the ground, listening to the silence.

She was perfectly alone. No one watching, no one there with her. In fact, she was not entirely sure that she was there herself.

A long time later, or maybe no time at all, she had the thought that she must exist, must be more than a disembodied thought, because she was lying on some surface.

She could feel it. Therefore, she was corporeal, had a sense of touch, and whatever she way laying on existed too.

As soon as she had this thought, she became aware that she was naked.

She was alone, so it probably didn’t matter that her bare bum was hanging out and her tits were squashed flat, she could continue to lay there as long as she liked and it didn’t seem likely that anyone would venture along.

But if she could feel, she could probably see, and, as always, her curiosity got the better of her and she blinked her eyes cautiously open.

She was laying in a field of bright mist, almost like a fog, except that rather that hiding her surroundings the mist seemed to become her surroundings.

She pushed herself up onto her elbows.

The floor underneath her was white, and though she thought it should be cold, like bathroom tile, it wasn’t. It wasn’t cold or warm or smooth or anything except there.

A flat blank something on which to be.

She sat up.

Her injuries were gone, as were her glasses, and her body was clean as it hadn’t been in ages.

Her new scars were all muted and fine and she didn’t look as starved as when she’d got dressed several days ago.

There was a noise, a soft noise, like an echo that reached her through the nothingness all around. It was the sound of some small creature that flapped and flailed and struggled. Like a bat caught in the floo.

Gwyn crossed her arms over her chest and wished for the first time that she was clothed.

The thought had barely crossed her mind when clothes appeared.

Clean knickers, a summer dress that fell to her knees and an outer robe…but no shoes.

Gwyn looked down at her feet, bare, pale and fine-boned, and supposed she mustn’t have wanted them.

She took a few padding steps into the mist, looking around. The more she looked the more there was to see.

A great domed glass roof glittered high above her in the sunlight.

She turned on the spot and the rest of her surroundings seemed to invent themselves before her eyes.

A wide-open space, bright and clean, a hall far larger than the Great Hall at Hogwarts with that clear domed glass ceiling.

It was empty.

It was quite the emptiest place she’d ever seen and she was alone, as she’d thought except—

There.

There was the thing that was making noise.

It had the shape of a child, except that it was skeletal, it’s skin raw and red and flayed clean off in places. It lay there curled on the ground, shoved under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath.

She was afraid of it.

And she wasn’t at the same time.

She pitied it. For it was pitiful, so broken and alone. But she couldn’t bear to approach it.

She knew what she should do.

It was a child, however deformed. She should pick it up, gather it in her arms and comfort it. That was what you did with a hurt child.

But she couldn’t.

She felt like the worse sort of coward.

“You cannot help it.”

Gwyn nearly jumped clean out of her skin. She was so focussed on the child she hadn’t heard him approach, but when she spun around there he was, Albus Dumbledore.

He was dressed in sweeping robes of pale blue, sprightly and upright, with a lifetime of cares gone from his face. Both his hands were whole, white and undamaged.

“Gwyn,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling behind his half-moon spectacles. “My dear you are extraordinary. And so brave. Come, let us walk, I can see the list of questions growing longer in your eyes.”

Stunned into silence, Gwyn followed as Dumbledore strode away from where the flayed child lay whimpering, leading her through the Hall that seemed to go on forever.

Eventually they came to two seats, stone benches, like the one the child had been huddled under and they sat down under the high, sparkling ceiling.

“You’re dead,” Gwyn said, needing a bit of confirmation, since the man in front of her seemed very lively for a dead person.

“Yes indeed,” said Dumbledore, smiling.

“Then…I’m dead as well?”

That seemed right. She’d gone into the forest and stood in front of Voldemort and the cold, green light of the Killing Curse had swept through her and then there was nothing until she’d woken up here. With another person she knew to be dead.

“Ah,” said Dumbledore, smiling even more mysteriously than usual. “That is the question, isn’t it? On the whole, dear girl, I’m inclined to think not.”

Gwyn arched one skeptical brow.

“Not?”

“Not,” agreed Dumbledore, twinkling at her like he knew some great secret and was eager for her reaction once she figured it out.

“I should have died,” Gwyn said. “I stood in front of him and let him kill me quietly.”

“And that will have made all the difference,” said Dumbledore.

Cheerfulness radiated from Dumbledore, like there was a light glowing just below his skin. He seemed not just happy but utterly content and at peace and filled with a transcendent kind of joy.

He made Gwyn feel crotchety just looking at him. Maybe that was the difference between being dead and being not-quite-dead.

“Explain,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

“But you already know, exactly what happened, don’t you?”

Gwyn chewed on her lower lip.

“I let him kill me. So, the part of his soul that was in me…it’s gone?”

She wasn’t exactly sure that this was true but it _felt_ true.

“Exactly,” said Dumbledore. “When the Killing Curse struck you, he destroyed it himself. Your soul is clean, whole, and once again completely your own.”

Gwyn glanced back to where she knew the child still lay, maimed and trembling. A pale, dark-haired child…

“It is beyond either of our help,” Dumbledore said, kindly.

Divining the direction of her thoughts as easily as he always did.

But Gwyn knew better than to trust him at his word.

“You’re sure about that?” she said.

“As sure as I can be,” said Dumbledore. “That is, I feel a certain truth about the words that transcends mere fact. That creature exists in a torment of its own making. It is only through its own actions that it might one day be whole again. But it will never leave this place.”

Gwyn understood then that this was the ultimate fate of those arrogant enough to try and cheat death. Which didn’t explain her circumstance though.

If the horcrux inside her was gone, its vessel had been destroyed. Since she was its vessel, she’d needed to die to make that happen.

Ergo she was dead.

“Think, dear girl,” Dumbledore urged her. “Remember what he did, in his ignorance, in his greed and cruelty.”

Gwyn remembered.

How could she forget? The night she was tied to that headstone was the worst night of her life for a good long while there.

“He used my blood,” she murmured.

“Precisely!” said Dumbledore. “He took your blood and rebuilt his living body with it! Your blood in his veins. And he chose to do it, to take from you Lily’s protection, to have it for himself! He tethered you to life for as long as he lives – a single gossamer strand of Lily’s enchantment. Just enough that his life keeps her sacrifice alive even when you are gone from the world. He unknowingly doubled the bond between you. Twined your destinies together more securely than two people have ever been bound since the times of Merlin and Arthur.”

“He saw what it did to Quirrell and he didn’t want to be vulnerable to it,” she murmured. “Didn’t want to lose his body again. He was afraid.”

“Yes,” Dumbledore agreed. “But if he’d known exactly what he was imbuing himself with, if he’d understood what your mother’s sacrifice had truly meant…well, if he’d been capable of that, he never would have become Lord Voldemort.”

Some piece of the puzzle was still missing though, Gwyn could feel it, like an itch in the back corner of her brain.

“The Deathly Hallows,” she said into the emptiness. “Voldemort killed me with the Elder Wand.”

“Ah yes,” said Dumbledore, he was still smiling but some of the cheer had fled from him and instead he looked like a kid caught out of bed past curfew. “The Hallows. Can you forgive me for not trusting you, knowing that the person I truly did not trust was myself? I dreaded you would make the same mistakes I did, succumb to the same temptation. I doubted…I doubted even when I knew you had a better, more generous heart than I.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Hallows are like fool’s gold. They are a desperate man’s dream. And only desperate men set themselves on the path to seek them.”

“But they’re real,” Gwyn protested.

“Real and dangerous. For they offer a way to conquer death,” said Dumbledore. “You know by now that I sought them out for that purpose.”

“With Grindelwald,” Gwyn said.

Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment and nodded.

“It was that fool’s dream, above all, that drew us together,” he said quietly. “Two clever, arrogant boys carried away by our own importance. Our shallow obsession. He came to Godric’s Hollow to examine the grave of Ignotus Peverall and learn the secrets of the third brother’s death.”

“And instead he met you,” said Gwyn.

“A kindred spirit,” said Dumbledore. “I was gifted. I was brilliant. I wanted to escape, to shine, to see the mysteries of the world and to solve them and to be known for it far and wide. I wanted glory. That is the frailty of genius, it seems, to always need an audience. Gellert and I were just alike except in one small way. I wanted people to revere me with love and Gellert didn’t care if the reverence was soured by fear or disgust. He was willing to do whatever was necessary to achieve his goals, no matter the cost.”

Gywn listened with half and ear as Dumbledore told the story. Filled in the gaps that had been bothering her for months and months as she paged through Rita Skeeter’s book.

Dumbledore and Grindelwald had loved each other. Whether they wanted to admit it or not. They had found the kind of person who finally saw all they were and all they could be and loved them anyway.

Grindelwald had, even after all those years, shut up in the dungeons of Nurmengard alone, lied to Voldemort about the wand.

There was no reason to do that. Not when a little charm, a little flattery might have persuaded Voldemort to let him go free. Grindelwald could have made a second start. The years had not diminished him entirely. But Grindelwald had stood fast instead. Had protected the memory of Albus Dumbledore to the best of his ability.

Gwyn considered telling Dumbledore outright. That Grindelwald had loved him at least that much.

But in the end, she only gave him that tiny seed of hope.

If there was an afterlife that he and Grindelwald were both a part of maybe it would grow into something more. Or maybe not.

Either way it wasn’t really her business.

Still, the more they talked, of Hallows and horcruxes and Dumbledore’s needlessly convoluted plan to get her and Voldemort together in the right place at the right time under the right set of circumstances, the more a sinking sort of certainty grew within her.

If she was still tethered to life and to Voldemort and she wasn’t here to help the maimed and crippled shreds of the soul Tom Riddle tortured and mutilated beyond repair then—

“I have to go back,” she said.

“You don’t have to do anything. You may choose to return if you wish. Or you may choose to board a train.”

“And where would it take me?”

“On,” said Dumbledore simply.

Gwyn imagined it.

On.

The place where so many of her friends and family had already gone on ahead. A place where the war couldn’t touch her anymore. A place like this where there was peace and beauty and warmth and love build into the very fabric of the world.

But.

“Voldemort has the Elder Wand,” she said.

“True.”

“Nagini wasn’t destroyed.”

“Also, true,” agreed Dumbledore. “I think if you choose to return there is a chance that Voldemort may be defeated for good. I believe there is an equal chance that he will meet his end if you go on. Though I cannot promise it either way. By returning you gain only one power, the power you’ve always held. You may ensure that you are there to protect those who need protecting as best as you can. Perhaps fewer families will be torn apart. Perhaps fewer souls maimed. Perhaps you will merely cast yourself between death and someone you love as your mother did before you and return as quickly as you left. We cannot know. But if you think the attempt worth the pain, then we say goodbye for the present.”

Gwyn nodded and sighed.

Nothing could ever be as difficult as walking into the Forest had been. But it was warm and light and peaceful here and she was turning away from that peace again. Deliberately turning it down, to walk into pain, suffering and the fear of more loss.

But that was the rub, wasn’t it?

Death was nothing to the dead. Death was only awful for the living left behind. And that was a truth she could carry with her for the rest of her days, however long or short they ended up being.

Still, she wished it could be just a little bit different. That there was more she could do. That she could have met her parents, Sirius and Remus again in this place and felt them as more than echoes in the shadows.

But there was no magic in the world that could bring the dead back to life. If her quest had taught her anything it was that. She had to give up on the idea that she’d ever again meet her lost loved ones in the flesh. It was a flickering flame of hope, gently snuffed out, and replaced by something like acceptance.

“Ah, I do not envy you,” said Dumbledore, his hand warm on her shoulder. “But I am so proud of you, of the strong fine woman you have become.”

Gwyn swallowed past the sudden lump in her throat and smiled for him.

“Thanks for believing in me,” she said. “I just have one question, before I go.”

“Ask my dear, and I will answer.”

“Has this been real? Or is it just happening inside my mind?”

Dumbledore beamed at her as if she’d asked a particularly clever question, and his voice was clear and strong in her ears even though the bright mist was sweeping through the white emptiness of the train station, obscuring his figure.

“Of course, it is happening inside your mind, my dear, but why should that mean it is not real?”


	2. The Fidelius Charm

She was lying face down on the ground again.

The smell of the Forest was thick in her nose. Dirt and pine and leaf litter.

She could feel the cold hard ground beneath her cheek, and the hinge of her glasses, digging into her temple.

Every inch of her ached. The place where the Killing Curse had struck was the worst off though. It felt like she’d been punched in the gut by a mailed fist.

She didn’t stir.

Her arm was bent out at an awkward angle and her mouth was gaping. There was a branch digging into her ribs and she could feel her wand pressed against her hip. The Invisibility Cloak, strangely, was gone.

Had Voldemort taken it?

Why take the Cloak but leave her wand?

Why leave her _body_?

She was alone in the clearing, she was sure. Voldemort had just left her there? She’d though for sure that he’d want to gloat, to humiliate her. To tear her down the way he hadn't been able to manage in life. 

Carefully, Gwyn carefully blinked her eyes open.

The Forest was dark and filled with soft sounds. Wind through the trees. Soft clicking noises. Those seemed familiar but she couldn’t quite place them. Where had she head them before—

A spider the size of a teacup scuttled over her hand, hairy and black as ink, and then away, across the leaves.

Another, even bigger, ran over her leg.

There were more, Gwyn realized as she finally placed the sound, Hundreds more. Acromantula. Aragog’s children. Small and large and probably not very happy about the destruction of their hollow.

She needed to get out, quickly.

She sprung to her feet, shaking another spider out of her hair, and grabbed for her wand crying: “ _Arania exime_!”

A dozen acromantula were flung away from her and she stumbled to her feet and broke immediately into a dead sprint.

She crashed right through a sticky web, and grimaced at the sensation of it clinging to her, but she couldn’t slow down. She didn’t know how far the acromantula would chase her.

She threw another spell blindly over her shoulder, gratified to hear the high squeal as the giant spiders were thrown back even farther.

She didn’t bother zig-zagging through the underbrush, the spiders were better at swift, sudden movement than she’d ever be, no her only hope was to reach the edge of the Forest before she was overwhelmed and hope that the Battle deterred them from pursuing her.

As she ran, she couldn’t help but wonder why the hell all the acromantula had returned to their hollow so soon after Voldemort’s departure.

The question pounded through her with every beat of her heart.

Why? Why? Why? Why? _Why_?

Eventually, chest heaving, dripping with sweat, she burst out of the forest into Hagrid’s pumpkin patch and gasped: “ _Protego totalum_!”

She slashed her wand at the forest’s edge and the spiders – few enough of them, considering, all slammed into the sudden barrier that sprang up at the treeline.

That at least bought her some time.

She stumbled out of the pumpkin patch, massaging at the stitch in her side, wand-raised and wishing for the Cloak when she noticed—

The lights were on in Hagrid’s hut. Smoke was coming from the chimney.

But that was…

Suddenly desperate to see a friendly face, Gwyn took the steps up two at a time and pounded on Hagrid’s door with the flat of her hand.

Inside a dog was barking.

“Get down, you great slobberin’ nuisance!”

The door to Hagrid’s hut swung open and there he was, blotting out the light from inside, three times the size of a normal man with a great wild tangle of coarse black hair and beard. He had his crossbow in one hand and the other was caught around the collar of a huge grey wolf-hound.

“Hagrid—”

Gwyn could hardly believe it.

She’d seen him, tied up in Aragog’s hollow. He’d probably had to watch her die…

Except something wasn’t right here.

There was no answering cry of delight, no great breath-stealing embrace. He didn’t even bellow that she was an imposter and how dare she impersonate poor dead Gwyn Potter.

Instead he blanched a bit under his beard and said: “Gallopin’ gorgons, are you alrigh’? Are you a student?”

That definitely wasn’t right.

“Help,” she said, for lack of anything better to say. “Please!”

“Right ‘course,” said Hagrid, pushing his dog back behind him into the hut. “You need to see the Headmaster, can you walk?”

“Yeah,” said Gwyn. “Yes, I can walk.”

“Come on then,” he said leading her along the familiar path up to the castle.

The castle that was whole and undamaged and such a wonderful terrifying sight that Gwyn could have sobbed out-loud.

But it didn’t make _sense_. 

Not a lick of it.

Gwyn had been under the impression that she’d be returning to the battle. This version of Hogwarts was either from before the battle or from long after it was over.

The Headmaster, Hagrid had said, who was the headmaster?

Snape and Dumbledore were both gone, did that mean McGonagall was too?

Who would be waiting for her in the head’s office? Professor Flitwick? Slughorn? Some Death Eater or Ministry lackey? Some stranger?

How much had she missed in that great white emptiness between life and death?

Her heart pounded just as hard as if she was still running from the acromantula as she and Hagrid climbed the steps to the doors of the castle and let themselves in through the wicket gate.

The halls of Hogwarts were dark and quiet, and clean. Gwyn almost felt guilty for tracking in all her mud and grime.

Hagrid led her unerringly to the statue of the golden gargoyle.

“ _Fizzin’ whizzbees_.”

The gargoyle sprung aside with a grinding of stone on stone, revealing the winding staircase up to the head’s tower.

Hagrid ushered her in before him.

“Straight up to the top,” he instructed.

Gwyn resisted the urge to take the stairs two at a time.

At the top of the stairs was the same broad oak door that had always been there and when she reached out to try the handle, it clicked and swung wide on its hinge.

And there, sitting behind his desk, dressed in midnight blue pajamas and quilted dressing gown of green silk was Albus Dumbledore.

He looked different, subtly, and it took Gwyn a long moment to realize that he seemed tired. The kind of tired that couldn’t be explained away as needing a good long nap. He looked like he had when he was alive, groaning under the weight of his responsibilities with none of the glow of radiant joy that had been imbued in him in death.

Gwyn glanced down at his hands.

They were white and whole and in them was the Elder Wand.

“Ah, Hagrid,” he said, as though he’d been expecting them. “I see you’ve found the disturbance I felt coming through the far edge of the wards.”

“Yessir, Professor Dumbledore,” said Hagrid. “Except she came right up and banged on my door, she did.”

“Very well,” said Dumbledore. “I will take her from here, Hagrid.”

Hagrid glanced between them again.

Gwyn knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that this short, exhausted, grubby young witch was no match for the great Albus Dumbledore. He was right of course, Gwyn couldn’t beat Dumbledore in a fight on her best day, not unless the poor man had been poisoned first. She also didn’t want to fight.

But the fact that both Hagrid and Dumbledore seemed wary of her seemed like a clue. A piece of the puzzle of where the hell she’d ended up.

“I’ll be leavin’ you to it then. Good night, sir,” Hagrid said letting himself out of Dumbledore’s office.

“Have a seat my dear,” said Dumbledore, not unkindly. “I promise that as long as you are honest with me about how you came to be on Hogwarts grounds, you will not be in any trouble.”

Gwyn moved forward and cautiously settled into the squashy purple armchairs that lived in front of Dumbledore’s wide desk.

“Now,” he said. “Let us start with the basics. I am Professor Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts.”

“I’m Gwyn, er, Gwyneth Potter, sir.”

She paused to see if any recognition showed on his face but he was inscrutable as always. Still, Dumbledore had known her or at least known _of_ her since the day she was born. Her and Neville Longbottom.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Potter,” he said, steepling his long fingers under his chin. “Especially as I was not aware that the Potter line had been blessed with another scion.”

He said this reasonably enough but it felt like a challenge to prove her claim. Gwyn had no idea how to do that. Dumbledore had always just known her even when she was trying to hide from him.

“It might not have been, I don’t know,” said Gwyn, running her fingers through her hair and wincing when they caught in a tangle. “I’m sorry, but it’s been a long—bloody hell— _year_ , and a longer night and I have no idea what’s happening anymore.”

She resisted the petulant urge to say this wasn’t what she had come back for. This was not the same Dumbledore she’d just been talking with in the emptiness after all, all it would do was confuse him, or prod him into asking awkward questions she couldn’t answer.

Something softened around his eyes.

Gwyn remembered all at once what he’d said to her the night that Sirius died. That he was a powerful legilimens who could sense when someone was lying to him.

That was dead useful.

“Why don’t we start with how you came to be in the far reaches of the Forbidden Forest?” suggested Dumbledore.

Gwyn chewed a bit on her lower lip and thought about how much she should say. She really needed more information. 

“Well that’s where I got knocked out, so I suppose it makes sense that that’s where I woke up, only everything is different. Then the acromantula chased me back onto the grounds and I saw that Hagrid was at home and well, here we are, sir.”

“What did you expect to see?”

“Pardon?”

“You say that everything was different, what was it, Miss Potter, that you were prepared to encounter if not acromantula and Hagrid?”

“When I hit the forest floor the first time it was empty, all the acromantula had been driven out and up at the castle there was a battle going on,” she said carefully.

“I see,” said Dumbledore, pale under the silver of his beard. “And on what day was this great battle occurring if I might ask?”

Gwyn caught on to his line of questioning, it wasn’t anything she hadn’t been wondering herself.

“May second 1998, ah Tuesday? I think? I wasn’t really keeping track.”

“Ah,” said Dumbledore, he seemed, relieved. “Well there we have it. It is currently Tuesday the sixth of September in the year 1977 at just gone one in the morning.”

Gwyn’s world was destroyed and rebuilt in the space of an instant though she hoped it didn’t show on her face.

Nineteen seventy-seven…she was almost twenty years ahead of where she’d meant to end up. Three years before she was even _born_.

“What the bloody hell,” she said in a strangled whisper.

Dumbledore swished the Elder Wand and a steaming pot of tea and a plate of ginger biscuits appeared on the desk before them.

Ginger biscuits meant he’d probably laced the tea with Calming Draught.

Gwyn took the nearest cup and drank it black and shoved a ginger biscuit quickly in her mouth to chase out the unforgivably bitter flavour.

She needed some enforced calm.

This was not the plan. None of this had been the plan.

She was meant to return to the moment she died, not to nineteen years before it!

“I can see this is a shock,” said Dumbledore after a moment.

“Yeah,” Gwyn breathed out, laughing without humour. “Shock. That’s one word for it.”

“I would imagine that your unconscious body was caught in some kind of magical backlash, you may be glad that you were unconscious during the transition between times.”

Not unconscious, Gwyn reminded herself. She’d been half-dead between times. The little tether that linked herself and Voldemort together was supposed to pull her back to him.

Though, she supposed he _was_ alive and well in this time. Four years and some odd days before his downfall. He was at the height of his power.

But shouldn’t the tether have only worked between his new, created body and herself?

The Killing Curse had driven her soul out of her body, flinging it into the emptiness and the soul fragment, the horcrux, as well. In the normal order of things her body would have died, she’d have been unable to return to it and she’d have gone on to whatever came after. If she’d resisted the call of the beyond and tried to return, she’d have been a ghost. Except that Voldemort’s living body with its connection to her mother’s powerful sacrificial protection had preserved her life. Her soul had gone back to her living body because Voldemort hadn’t been able to kill her, not with the Elder Wand or without it.

How in the name of Merlin had her living body gone years into the past though?

Did it matter?

You couldn’t ever travel forward in time, only backwards.

She wouldn’t get back to nineteen ninety-eight unless she took the long way and lived through the nineteen intervening years.

“Shit,” she breathed into the obliging quiet of Dumbledore’s office.

“Quite,” Dumbledore agreed, twinkling at her again.

“What am I going to do?”

“For the time being I would recommend obscuring all information of the future to keep it from tempting others to selfish acts,” said Dumbledore. “You may be aware that the time you have come to is only marginally less dangerous than the time you have left and there are many unscrupulous folk who would be only too willing to use your foreknowledge for their own gain.”

“Right, how do we do that? Obscure me?”

“There is a powerful protective enchantment called the Fidelius Charm, have you heard of it?”

“Fidelius?” said Gwyn. “Isn’t that only for hiding places?”

“Not so,” said Dumbledore. “It is for keeping safe all manner of secrets within the heart of a living person. If I cast it with the intention of keeping secret the information you carry from the future. The secret, including your true identity, will be forcibly kept—even from automated magical records.”

Gwyn understood what he was implying. Ministry records, genealogies, the Marauder’s Map none of them would register the secret as long as the secret keeper was alive.

“Can you cast it?” she asked.

“Would you trust me to carry such knowledge?” he asked, not looking at her but out the window.

He said it quietly, absentmindedly, talking to himself instead of her.

What he was really asking, was whether he trusted himself with such knowledge. Did he trust that he wouldn’t overstep and invade her mind if he felt her knowledge could save the students who were his responsibility? If he thought it could end the war. Did he have the strength to ignore the power of the temptation?

He doubted himself. He always did. And perhaps he was right to.

Once bitten, twice shy.

But that just meant she knew exactly the kind of extra insurance he needed to ensure that he would keep his promise.

“Sir,” she said carefully. “I don’t know if you’ve gathered, but I know you well, from my time. Very well.”

“Oh?”

“If you’d like, I can cast the Fidelius on the secret of who killed Ariana Dumbledore,” she said carefully.

Dumbledore went stiff in his chair.

“You know?” he said, his voice small and tremulous. “You know which—no. Please, don’t tell me.”

“I won’t,” she said, offering him a sad smile.

“I doubted you when you said you knew me,” he said with a quiet chuckle, “for I have not allowed anyone to come to know me in a very long time. But it seems there are things, and people, still left in this world that can surprise me. It is very bracing to be reminded of such.”

“The charm,” said Gwyn. “What do we need to do?”

“Yes, the incantation is thus,” he said. “ _Fideliar Fidelio fidelius_. And your wand must be pointed at your heart. You must feel in your very bones that the secret must be kept. You must dwell on all aspects of it. When it is done you will know. I will demonstrate.”

He turned the Elder Wand on himself and took a deep breath, drawing a small circle in the place over his heart and murmuring the incantation.

His eyes slipped shut for a moment and his brow furrowed. For a moment a white-gold light pulsed around him, like an aura, to the rhythm of his heartbeat.

It faded quickly but Dumbledore still took a moment to open his eyes.

“There now,” he said. “Try to write your full name on a scrap of parchment.”

He summoned some, and a quill from his desk and sent them over to her.

She got her first name down alright, and the E for her middle name but when she tried to address herself as Gwyneth Euphemia Potter her hand refused to form the letters and the most she got out of trying again was an illegible scribble.

She showed Dumbledore.

“Wonderful,” he said. “Now yourself.”

Gwyn turned Draco Malfoy’s wand on herself and thought of what should be covered under the secret of Ariana’s death. Chewing on her lip she decided—everything. Everything that Rita Skeeter had ferreted out for her awful book. Except there was one thing that she should keep separate from that.

“When you’re ready,” Dumbledore said as soon as her eyes were opened.

“ _Fideliar Fidelio fidelius_ ,” she whispered.

She gasped as she felt the spell take hold.

It was like it was testing her commitment to holding on to the secret, it felt like she was twelve years old again and fit to burst with the secrets she and Ron had gleaned from Draco Malfoy.

She bit her lip, hard enough to make it bleed.

None of it was her secret to tell. It was between her and Dumbledore and not even Grindelwald could use it as a weapon anymore. As long as she lived, he’d never be able to tell Dumbledore the truth.

“Done,” said Dumbledore. “With your permission my dear, I will try to divine the secret from you through _veritaserum_.”

“Go for it,” she said.

Dumbledore pulled a small crystal phial with an eyedropper out of his desk drawer and let half a drop spill into the teapot before pouring her a cup.

“It should only keep it’s effects for a few minutes,” he told her.

“Bottoms up,” Gwyn said, knocking back the tea like it was cheap firewhiskey.

It took a moment for the hazy floating feeling to come over her. Like the Imperius Curse, except there was no outside will to fight against.

“Who,” asked Dumbledore in that same trembling voice. “Who killed Ariana Dumbledore?”

Gwyn tipped her head, birdlike. She didn’t have to say anything.

“Who was involved in the duel that resulted in her death? Why was she killed?”

Gwyn stayed quiet.

Dumbledore breathed a quiet sigh of something that might have been relief.

“Who won the 1998 Hogwarts Quidditch Cup?” he asked next, a bit more firmly.

Gwyn’s mouth was moving before she could think to stop it.

“There was no Hogwarts Quidditch Cup in 1998,” she said.

The rest of it wanted to come pouring out. The why. But that was all that she _needed_ to say so she bit her tongue and didn’t say the rest.

Dumbledore looked like he wanted to ask the why himself, but he didn’t and they sat in silence with each other for a few minutes waiting for the truth serum to wear off.

Gwyn had another three ginger biscuits because her body was finally catching on to the fact that they were done with their impossible feats of daring heroism for the moment and were almost literally starving.

“It’s worn off,” she said around a fourth biscuit, once her head didn’t feel so muzzy.

“Excellent,” said Dumbledore. “Now we need a bit of a plan. I would like to keep you here at Hogwarts, my dear, how do you feel about that?”

“That would be great, sir,” she said.

“In that case, it would be best if we begun crafting your new history,” he said. “You are young enough I think, to pass as a seventh-year student?”

“I’m a July baby, should’ve been done my seventh year in a few weeks but I didn’t go back to school at the start of term because of…everything,” she admitted.

“That makes things simpler,” said Dumbledore. “What NEWT courses were you planning on?”

“Erm, Defense, Transfiguration, Potions, Herbology, Charms, and Care of Magical Creatures,” Gwyn said.

“And might I venture a guess that you were previously sorted into Gryffindor house?”

Gwyn smiled.

“Yes, sir. According to my professors I’m ‘the worst of the reckless lot’.”

“A noble title to be sure,” he said, chuckling. “Now, you’ve come to use with nothing but your wand and the clothes on your back. We must rectify that before we introduce you to the school and I daresay a visit to Madame Pomfrey will also be in order.”

“And a bath,” Gwyn muttered, noticing for the first time that the front of her jumper was stained rust-brown with Snape’s blood and that there was webbing clinging to her trainers.

“Yes, that as well. For once the tumultuousness of the times works in our favour. You are not the first muggle-born homeschool student to arrive in dire straits at the gates of Hogwarts. Nor unfortunately, will you be the last. Have you a preferred alias?”

Gwyn winced.

She was particularly awful at aliases actually. And naming things.

“No, sir,” she said finally. “You pick.”

Dumbledore hummed a bit to himself.

“Gwyn Goodwin, perhaps?” he suggested. “I confess I find the alliteration appealing.”

“Brilliant,” sighed Gwyn. “We’ll go with that.”

“In that case, Miss Goodwin,” he said. “I believe it is time to wake our dear school matron.”

Madame Pomfrey was roused with a quick Patronus and by the time Gwyn and Dumbledore made it to the hospital wing she was already dressed and waiting for them.

Also she had already worked herself into a towering dudgeon. 

“Do I want to know how long she’s been here?” she snapped at Dumbledore ushering Gwyn into her usual bed.

“Only a little more than an hour, Madame,” said Dumbledore.

“And yet that was time-enough to ply her with Calming Drought and Truth Serum?”

Madame Pomfrey flicked her wand at Gwyn in a familiar suite of diagnostic spells.

“Look at this Albus!” she said. “Contusions, lacerations, spell damage, malnutrition, hairline fractures in five ribs and an ankle, magical exhaustion, physical exhaustion!”

Dumbledore looked contrite and opened his mouth.

“No! Out! I don’t want to hear it!” she said. “You can come back tomorrow afternoon after lunch, because Miss Goodwin will certainly not be leaving this ward before dinner!”

Dumbledore left with good grace and Gwyn suffered through having her clothes unfused from her body and having Madame Pomfrey ply her with potions and hit her with spells.

She was feeling loads better by the time she was chivvied into the infirmary shower.

It took three washes to get all the detritus out of her hair and when she’d suffered through a De-Tangling Charm, she found that it had grown so long it brushed her shoulder blades in the back. A Drying Charm made it fluff out like a particularly irascible cloud but that was better than sleeping on wet hair.

Madame Pomfrey had turned the lights back down in the ward and had put a little bottle of Dreamless Sleep on her bedside that Gwyn drank gratefully.

It felt like she hadn’t slept for a week, and being dead was really not a very restful experience.

Before her head even hit the pillow, she was fast asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you all enjoyed, let me know what you think or what you'd like to see in the comments!
> 
> Just as a bit of fair warning, the first 3-4 chapters are going to go up nice and quick for two reasons, beginnings are my strong suit, and no one wants to start a HP WIP with less than 10k words to it's name if they can help it. Once those four chapters are posted updates will probably be much slower. 
> 
> I am shocked and awed at the response I've been getting! Thanks to everyone who already took the time to read, review kudos, bookmark and subscribe! Seeing all people who want to read my humble story is definitely the most gratifying part of being a writer.


	3. Adjustments

As promised, Gwyn was confined to the hospital wing for the next day.

She didn’t mind this as much as she might’ve because she’d spent the past year running for her life, sleeping on a glorified camp cot, never knowing where her next meal might arrive from.

The Hogwarts hospital wing boasted moderately comfortable beds with soft linen sheets, hot water for the shower, hot soup and porridge delivered from the kitchens, and the opportunity to silence her bed-hangings and sleep for ten straight hours.

With the horcrux gone she had no nightmares, no lingering pains in her scar, and she felt better than she had since the start of fifth year.

The difference was astonishing.

Madame Pomfrey, of course, was not satisfied.

“I’m putting you on a full course of medicaments,” she announced briskly at lunch. “Your body hasn’t been getting anywhere near the nutrients it requires over a frankly alarming period of time, Miss Goodwin. It’s come to the point where we need to augment your diet with potions. You will take one with every meal and these three before going to sleep at a reasonable hour. At the end of the month we will assess your progress and adjust your intake as necessary.”

Gwyn didn’t make a fuss.

This had also happened in First Year when she’d sent her home with potions she couldn’t take at the Dursleys’. Fortunately, she’d spent the second half of summer being fed up on Molly Weasley’s good home cooking and she passed Madame Pomfrey’s assessment in September. Since then, her time away from the Dursleys had been enough to keep her in the green.

Now she’d undone all that progress.

She was skin and bones under her hospital pajamas, the elastic of her cheap knickers sagging around her hips and bum, and she certainly didn’t need a bra except to keep her nips from chaffing.

She looked like a skeleton, and only the wild tangle of her hair concealed how gaunt her face had become. Gwyn had never been a person who cared all that much about her appearance but even her abused vanity was pricked by the state of her body.

She took the nutrient potions without complaint and ate as much as she could bear to of everything that was put in front of her.

Not that it was any hardship.

She’d forgotten how good real food could taste.

Dumbledore came to visit her just before dinner, earning himself a dark glower from Madame Pomfrey before she agreed to go to her office and give them privacy.

“Miss Goodwin,” he said, conjuring a stately wingback chair in a plush wine-colored velvet and settling in next to her bed.

“Professor.”

“I have arranged for you to take advantage of the Hogwarts Student Relief Fund,” he told her. “It is a small stipend, paid twice yearly to cover books and other necessities. No great fortune, but enough to purchase your books and school robes.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Gwyn, who hadn’t even though to worry about money just yet.

“Additionally, I had a few basic items sent up from Hogsmeade village by my brother Aberforth, including an owl order catalogue so that you may fill your remaining requirements at your leisure.”

“Er, thank you sir,” she said again, trying not to imagine the barman from the Hogshead standing in the ladies’ intimates corner at Gladrags.

“I was a bit surprised by how readily my brother seemed to agree to my request,” said Dumbledore pointedly.

“Oh, that might be my fault,” Gwyn admitted. “I didn’t just conceal one piece of information when I cast the Fidelius. I concealed almost everything I know about the two months Grindelwald stayed in Godric’s Hollow. There are certain things certain Dark Lords probably shouldn’t know about, ever.”

Gwyn thought for a moment she might get a scolding about overstepping her bounds but Dumbledore gave her a nod of acknowledgement instead.

Two years ago, she’d have done anything for that nod.

Now it felt like too much responsibility for someone as reckless as herself.

It took them both a good long minute to jolt themselves out of their brooding.

“I leave it to you to invent your own backstory,” Dumbledore said. “Keeping in mind that the best lies are simply veiled truths.”

“I’m a rubbish liar most of the time,” she confessed.

“Not a bad thing to be,” Dumbledore said. “Though your dislike of falsehoods may make your current situation more challenging.”

Dumbledore handed off her new timetable and books as well as a list of assignments she’d missed out on by being in the future on the first day of classes and the hospital wing all the second.

Gwyn stared with no small amount of dismay at the list.

She didn’t recognize most of the topics, but she remembered McGonagall’s injunction on verbal spells in sixth year and her struggle to keep up. Potions she’d only done as well as she had by following the directions in the Prince’s potion book. Defense might have been a cinch if she never had to write an essay, but since when was she ever that lucky?

This was going to be harder than she thought.

Dumbledore left her to studies with a low chuckle and a pat on her shoulder.

Homework was a lot harder than she remembered.

Possibly because she hadn’t been forcing her brain to think in terms of essays for a year or more, possibly because Hermione wasn’t there beside her to show her the books and pages she’d need and come out with some obscure bit of information at just the right time to trigger her imagination.

Merlin help her, she needed to revise the sixth-year curriculum and find out what was actually in it because everything that wasn’t needed in the horcrux hunt had leaked out of her brain at some point.

She outlined all five—five!—of the homework essays that she needed to do and resigned herself to a weekend in the library before she picked up her wand to practice the spells she needed to know for Charms and Transfiguration. 

Although the hawthorn wand still felt odd in her hand, she and it were getting used to each other. The wand seemed to finally accept that she’d won it and settled into her hand easily, the flow and feel of the magic was different than what she was used to. Not better or worse, just different.

Hawthorn wands, she remembered Ollivander saying, were especially good for wielders going through a period of turmoil. She almost wanted to pat the poor thing and ask it to remember fondly the vacation of being held by Draco Malfoy.

She mastered the spells verbally quickly enough to be gratifying, but non-verbal was still a complete and total bust. She could murmur or whisper the spell but as soon as she made no noise the magic stopped working properly.

Dinner appeared promptly and Gwyn drank her nutrient potion and submitted to Madame Pomfrey’s assessments with relatively good grace.

“I’d like to keep you another day,” she sighed, tapping her wand. “But you can go up to Gryffindor Tower this evening if you choose.”

“Yes please,” Gwyn agreed before she could change her mind.

The Madame Pomfrey of her own time would’ve kept her in hospital until she gained back ten pounds, she was sure.

“Alright,” she sighed. “I will have a house-elf deliver your potions in the evenings and with your meals so that you don’t skip doses.”

“Thanks, Madame Pomfrey.”

Madame Pomfrey squeezed her shoulder.

“I don’t pretend to know how you got into such a state Miss Goodwin but I mean to see you on the other side of it,” she said.

Gwyn was saved from having to respond by a knock on the door.

“Mr Lupin,” said Madame Pomfrey bristling. “If you’re here for yourself on the second day of term, I swear to Circe, I’ll tie you to one of these beds!”

Remus Lupin grinned at her in a way that hinted at mischief.

He was so young, younger than he’d been even when his shade had been summoned with the Resurrection Stone. His face was unlined, though striped here and there with faded scars and his hair was thick and dark untouched by grey.

He looked happy.

“I’m here to escort the new student to the Tower,” he said. “Lily has Head Duties otherwise she would have come herself.”

“Hmm. Very well, Miss Goodwin, gather your things and you may go.”

Gwyn was quick to scramble out of bed, snatch up her old clothes and duck into the bathroom to change out of the hospital pajamas.

The house-elves had worked their magic and her jeans and jumper looked, if not quite good as new, then at least as good as when she’d inherited them from Aunt Petunia. Which worked out rather well since they were dated for the nineties but perfect for the seventies.

She gathered her hair into a messy twist and stuck her wand through it and then hurried back out into the hospital wing to gather her homework and shove her feet into her battered trainers.

“Ready!” she announced.

“Great,” said Remus. “This way.”

He held the door open for her and then led her through the familiar corridors and passageways at a leisurely pace.

“I’m Remus, by the way, Remus Lupin, seventh-year prefect,” he said, holding out a hand.

“Gwyn Goodwin,” she said, shaking it, pleased when she didn’t stumble over her name.

“What brings you to Hogwarts?”

“Protection,” Gwyn said, hugging her books a bit tighter to her chest. “From out there, the war.”

“Ah,” said Remus. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Gwyn. “I’m sure everyone is going to be asking sooner or later.”

She pulled a face at the very thought. At least here she wasn’t famous. Just another unfortunate muggle-born.

“Just because they ask doesn’t mean you have to answer the nosy sods,” said Remus. “Watch the trick step there.”

Gwyn hopped over the trick step with the ease of long-practice and natural athleticism.

“So, less fraught conversation starter,” suggested Remus. “Classes?”

Gwyn groaned out a laugh.

“I though you said less fraught,” she said. “I’m homeschool, so I expected to be a little behind but look at all this homework! I’m only taking six courses!”

“Still, having the opportunity to take NEWT-level courses at Hogwarts, it’ll give you loads more opportunities once we graduate. Most places hire Hogwarts graduate exclusively.”

“I always figured I’d live half-half like my tutor, you know? Work like a muggle and live like a witch.”

“Who was your tutor?” asked Remus, rather than asking what happened.

“Mrs. Figg,” said Gwyn with a sad sort of fondness. “She was this batty old lady with a million part-kneazles.”

“I’m sorry,” said Remus.

“Oh! No, sorry, she’s not—she got out of dodge early, went into hiding with squib relatives, no one knows where,” Gwyn invented. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

Remus smiled.

“Well good then,” he said. “Here we are.”

They stopped in front of the portrait of the Fat Lady in her pink silk dress.

“This is the entrance to the Gryffindor Tower,” Remus explained. “You aren’t permitted to share the password around with members of other houses, though sometimes they might be invited in for parties or the like. The password changes every week, and you can come to any prefect or the Head Boy and Girl if you miss the announcement. The week it’s _sarsaparilla_.”

The portrait of the Fat Lady swung open on its hinge.

“Ladies first,” said Remus, offering her a hand up.

“Thank you, kind sir,” said Gwyn a bit charmed by his easy chivalry.

Gwyn made her way through the portrait hole and into the common room proper and felt a wash of nostalgia so strong she had to pause with a hand on the wall to ground herself.

The Gryffindor common room looked almost exactly the same.

The stone walls were draped in tapestries and a fire crackled in the hearth. There was mismatched furniture in all shades of red, gold and purples and Hermione’s usual study spot was occupied by two sandy-haired boys who might have been brothers playing wizard chess.

“Remy!” someone called out. “You’re back!”

Gwyn’s breath caught a little in her throat as she caught her first sight of the seventeen-year-old version of Sirius Black.

If Remus looked good, Sirius looked like something out of a lurid novel.

He was tall, the utter bastard, with longish black hair and eyes so dark a grey they almost seemed black. He had the kind of impeccable posture that put Gwyn in mind of Malfoy or Daphne Greengrass and he moved with an easy loping grace. There was nothing of the aging rock star in him. Nothing of the haggard, skeletal escaped convict either.

He looked like the handsome man who’d danced at her parents’ wedding.

Sweet Circe she’d _missed_ him.

Sirius bounded over and looped an arm around Remus’ neck.

“Jamie’s abandoned us for McGonagall,” he announced. “She’s showing him and Evans their rounds and explaining their duties. Duties, Remus!”

“He is the Head Boy,” Remus explained with an air of someone who’d had this conversation many times before. “He has Head Duties.”

“Another Marauder with the badge!” moaned Sirius. “What is this world coming to?”

Remus rolled his eyes.

“Gwyn this is Sirius Black, no, he’s not always like this. Generally, he’s worse,” Remus said.

“I resemble that remark,” said Sirius, winking.

“Sirius, this is Gwyn Goodwin, transfer student recently released from the Hospital Wing.”

He said this last bit in a warning voice.

“N-nice to meet you,” Gwyn managed to stammer, holding out a hand.

To her surprise, rather than shaking it like a normal bloke, Sirius bowed over her hand like she was the Queen kissing the air above her knobbly bruised knuckles.

“The pleasure is all mine,” he all but purred in a voice like dark velvet.

Gwyn cursed her fair face. He and Remus could probably see she was blushing up to the roots of her hair.

“Okay,” she said, snatching her hand back. “That’s enough of that.”

Remus was trying to hide his amusement and failing miserably, while Sirius had affected a bereft expression.

He looked like nothing so much as some tragic Byronic hero.

Merlin help her, she thought it was cute.

“Okay, well, Gwyn,” said Remus clearing his throat, instead of laughing. “Your dorm is up the left staircase, should be the last door on the end. You can head up early if you like or I can help you with some of the class work you missed?”

Gwyn really had no interest in doing more homework, but she did want to hang out with these odd, young versions of her godfather and her former professor. Her friends, in another life. Part of her cobbled-together little pseudo-family.

“Yeah,” she said. “That would be great. Thanks, Remus. I’m, erm, quite far behind from what I can tell. Can’t cast non-verbal spells for love or money.”

“That’s alright,” said Sirius, leading the way back to the circle of armchairs by the fire. “We’ve had plenty of practice coaching Petey. He’s rubbish at non-verbal as well.”

Peter Pettigrew flipped Sirius the bird without looking up from the essay he was working on.

“Well you are,” said Sirius.

Peter Pettigrew wasn’t what Gwyn had expected. For one thing, although he was still quite short, he wasn’t fat. He had a full head of neatly trimmed hair, as pale a blond as Draco Malfoy’s and he was chewing fretfully on his thumbnail as he worked on the essay Sprout had assigned for Herbology. He looked about twelve. Still, baby-faced except for a pointy little nose.

Gwyn was hard-pressed to recognize Wormtail in him at all.

She settled into the chair diagonal from Pettigrew and set her work down on the little coffee table they’d commandeered.

“If non-verbal spells are a weakness then you’re not going to get much out of your classwork until you get the hang of them,” said Remus, not unkindly.

“Right,” sighed Gwyn.

“Let’s just see where you’re at to start with,” said Remus. “Can you cast a verbal Extension Charm?”

Gwyn had to wrack her brain for the incantation but she remembered they’d done extension charms in sixth, that was probably when Hermione had started working on her beaded bag.

“ _Amplio_ ,” she murmured, extending the table.

“Oi!” Peter protested. “Warn a bloke!”

“Sorry Pete,” Remus said. “Okay, that looks good, now let me just—”

He transfigured a bit of parchment into a folded paper replica of the coffee table. Wordlessly, the bastard.

“So, we don’t disturb Peter,” he explained. “Okay, now try extending this the same way you did the coffee table, only non-verbal.”

Gwyn narrowed her eyes at the little origami table and tried to hold the incantation in her mind.

 _Amplio_ , she thought, making the proper wand movements.

The little table twitched a bit as though there was a draft in the room but otherwise remained exactly the same.

“There’s your problem,” said Sirius, who was lounging in the armchair next to Peter.

“What is?”

“You’re thinking to hard,” Sirius said, waving his hand dismissively.

Gwyn could feel her face scrunching up with skepticism.

“Wordless magic requires intense focus and concentration,” she said. “Mental flexibility.”

“Right,” agreed Sirius. “So, what exactly is flexible about tensing every muscle in your body, brain included?”

“The brain isn’t a muscle, Pads,” Remus said. “He’s right though, in a way, muggle-borns have a lot of trouble with non-verbal magic because they don’t see a lot of different magical acts before Hogwarts but adult witches and wizards, properly trained ones, hardly ever use incantations.”

Gwyn had noticed that.

All the older Weasleys, and even Ron and Ginny more and more, used wordless spells like they were natural. All the powerful wizards she knew did most of their magic with a thought and a gesture, no one used incantations unless they wanted a particularly powerful and exact result. Not even Hagrid.

“Here let’s think of it a bit differently,” said Remus. “Pick up the little paper table?”

Gwyn did, holding it out in the palm of her head.

“Right now, concentrate with all your focus on every single muscle that flexes or contracts in your arm as you set it back down.”

Gwyn tried, and it was slow going, like doing everything at one-eighth speed on her omnioculars. By the time she set the table back on the desk a little bead of sweat had appeared on her hairline.

“Doing magic with an incantation is a little like that,” Remus said. “Slowing everything down to an extreme level of precision whereas when you picked up the table the first time it was a matter of simplicity, instinct, and economy of movement.”

Gwyn huffed out a breath.

“Okay, great, that makes a lot of sense but it still doesn’t help _me_ perform wordless magic,” she said.

“Doesn’t it?” prodded Remus. “Try the charm again, but this time don’t think of the charm, it’s mechanics, the incantation. Instead just imagine the end result once the table has been extended, and when you have the image in your mind, cast.”

It was just like the boggart in third-year all over again.

If Gwyn closed her eyes, she could almost hear Professor Lupin whispering _sotto voce_ : “I want you to picture Professor Snape in your grandmother’s clothes.”

 _Clear your mind_ , barked Gwyn’s inner Snape. _Focus_.

Not on the spell, on the result.

Gwyn tried to picture it in her mind, the gentle extension of the paper table just an inch on either side.

With her eyes still closed she flicked her wand.

“There,” said Lupin.

 _Remus_ , she reminded herself, cracking an eye open. 

“Much better.”

Gwyn grinned. The little paper table was exactly how she’d imagined it, except she’d forgotten to account for physics and it sagged awfully in the middle.

“Try it with something else,” Sirius suggested. “A different charm, something you’re good at.”

She closed her eyes again for a moment to concentrate and then flicked her wand at the paper table.

This time her charm was less successful and the paper table went zooming past her into the fireplace.

Still it was better than anything she’d managed last year.

“Practice,” Remus said with sympathy.

“We can hex your hair blue every time you say a spell verbally, like we do with Petey, if you like?”

“Thanks Black,” said Gwyn dryly. “You’re all heart.”

“I am aren’t I,” he said, magnanimously. “I have a rarefied generosity of spirit. Too good for this world really.”

Remus and Peter exchanged a glance, and burst almost immediately into helpless snickering.

“You see what I have to put up with Goodwin?” he said, longsuffering.

Gwyn snorted.

“Oh, yes,” she said with all the mock-seriousness she could muster. “Very hard done by. Don’t know how you manage.”

“Oi, have you sods managed to replace me already!”

The man that sprang over the back of the loveseat to flop down beside Remus was unmistakeably and irrevocably James Potter.

“It would serve you right, you rule-abiding bastard,” laughed Sirius, his face overtaken with delight in a way that Gwyn had never seen before.

Like a flower turning toward the sun.

Everyone always said how she and James looked just alike.

She hadn’t understood it until just now because, yes, her hair was dark and messy and she wore glasses with wire-rimmed framed like James Potter, but she had a softer heart-shaped face and a wider nose with a spray of fain freckles over the bridge.

But she and James Potter had the exact same smile, right down to the too-pointy canines.

“Lily!” Remus called. “Come here and meet your new roommate! Gwyn Goodwin, Lily Evans.”

Gwyn’s breath caught.

 _Mum_.

She’d seen photographs of course, seen colourless shades brought forth by Priori Incantatum or the Resurrection Stone. They all paled in comparison to the real thing.

Lily’s hair was threaded with all the reds and golds of autumn just a little darker than a living flame. And her eyes were the same deep dark mossy green as Gwyn’s. Dark enough that they might be mistaken for brown until they caught the light.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m the Head Girl, Lily.”

She reached out her hand and Gwyn shook it.

“That’s James Potter, he’s got the biggest head of any person you’ll ever meet but he uses it for thinking often enough that he ended up the Head Boy.”

“Almost a real compliment,” James said, waggling his eyebrows. “Careful, or I’ll start to think you may be warming up to me Evans.”

Lily rolled her eyes.

“It’s getting late and you’ve just got out of hospital, have you been up to the dorm yet?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Gwyn said, grateful when her voice didn’t shake.

“Come on, I’ll show you up and introduce you to your other new roommate,” Lily offered.

Gwyn gathered up her homework and followed Lily Evans up the left-hand staircase to the girl’s dormitory.

“It’ll be nice to have another girl,” Lily said. “It’s just me and Marlene McKinnon in our room since Dottie and Emmeline didn’t want to take the NEWTs.”

She knocked on the door before letting herself into the dorm.

“Marlie?” she called.

Marlene McKinnon was a pretty witch with blond hair, braided away from her face in a crownlike construction, and big brown eyes. She looked up from where she was lying on her four-poster, already in a blue silk pajama set and dressing gown embroidered with golden birds, leafing through a catalogue of some kind.

“Back already?” she said.

“Today we just went over everything with Professor McGonagall,” Lily explained. “Tomorrow we’ll go out a little later and I’ll be back around eleven thirty if all goes well. This is the transfer student I was telling you about.”

“Gwyn Goodwin,” said Gwyn, waving. “Hi.”

“Hi,” said Marlene. “I heard you were in hospital because of a portkey malfunction? Rotten luck.”

“Yeah,” said Gwyn, biting her tongue on the urge to laugh. “Rotten luck.”

“Bed there’s yours,” she added. “Elves brought your trunk up.”

Gwyn was a little surprised to see there was a trunk.

It looked old enough to have belonged to either or both of the Dumbledore brothers but someone had stamped it with her new initials. Inside was pretty bare without her schoolbooks, but Aberforth had come up with a few dresses and a belt to make them fit nicely as well as a pair of trousers, some better shoes, a few woolly jumpers and enough socks in interesting colors and patterns that she knew Aberforth wasn’t the only Dumbledore to have contributed.

“The bathroom’s through there,” Lily added.

“Right,” said Gwyn, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. “I’ll just—”

She grabbed the pajama set and the little toiletry case and fled into the bathroom.

“Could you be more awkward?” she asked her reflection.

“I suppose that remains to be seen, dearie,” the mirror answered. “Though if you’re worried about putting your best foot forward you might try doing something about that bird’s nest you have there.”

Gwyn ignored it, skinning out of her jeans and jumper and into the soft cotton pajama set that had been found for her.

She wouldn’t usually wear a pajama set – that’s what your best mates’ old quidditch tees were for – but it somehow felt inappropriate in front of Marlene who looked glamourous enough to have stepped out of a magazine even though she was just getting ready for bed.

Gwyn opened the toiletries case and thanked the stars for the Weasleys. Without their influence she’d never be able to tell the face-wash from the tooth powder.

But all too soon her face was washed and her teeth were brushed and she was dressed in the pajamas and she couldn’t dally any longer.

She slipped back into the room and found that Lily had also changed into her nightclothes, a plain cotton nightgown and a blue housecoat that looked well-loved. She and Marlene were huddled together over the catalogue that Marlene had been perusing and she leapt up as Gwyn came back into the room.

“Me next!” she said. “Marlie why don’t you ask Gwyn what she thinks?”

Marlene huffed as Lily sped into the bathroom and shut the door very firmly behind her.

“Morgana knows I love the girl like a sister, but Lily Evans and quidditch are like oil and water,” she said. “I don’t suppose you like quidditch? Or even just flying?”

“I love quidditch,” Gwyn said, a little surprised that _Marlene_ liked quidditch.

“Ooh, come here and tell me what you think of this then,” she said. “I got some money for my birthday and I want a new broom – I can’t decide between the Nimbus 800 or the Cleansweep 12.”

“What position do you play?”

“Keeper,” said Marlene smirking. “Beat out twelve boys for it last year.”

“Then why not the Dart?” asked Gwyn. “It’s a better price than the Cleansweep and more sensitive to subtle shifts, good for quick changes in direction, and you don’t need too much in the way of acceleration as a keeper.”

“The Dart,” mused Marlene, flipping open to the page.

“I forget the model number but I remember it was the voted the best broom for keepers in 1975,” Gwyn added.

All thanks to Quidditch Through the Ages.

“They have a newer model out, the Dart 360,” Marlene said, tapping one elegantly manicured fingernail on her lower lip. “The specs aren’t as well rounded as the other brooms, of course, but the braking charms are some of the best in class.”

“It’s also not as pretty as the Nimbus,” said Gwyn.

“Too right,” said Marlene. “That glossy cherry-wood is just decadent! What position do you play?”

“Seeker, usually,” Gwyn said. “But I’ve done beater and chaser as well for pick up games.”

“You should come to trials,” Marlene said. “It would be nice to have another girl on the team and Potter’s a good captain. If we had a couple better than decent players, we’d have a real shot at the cup this year.”

Gwyn imagined it for a moment, back on the quidditch team, playing quidditch with her dad.

“That would be wonderful,” she said. “But it looks like I’m pretty far behind in classes and I really don’t have money for a broomstick.”

“At least come to trials,” said Marlene. “They’re next Saturday, you’ll have a better idea of how to manage your coursework and if you pass, I’ll let you have my old Starburst for the year.”

“That—Marlene—”

“I’m dead set on it now,” she said. “I warn you saying it’s ‘too much’ will not dissuade me!”

“It’s true,” said Lily, coming back in from the bathroom with her hair in plaits. “When my sister ruined my dress robes right before the New Year’s Eve Ball she handed me hers and called it a Christmas gift. Flat out refused to take them back and bought an even more extravagant pair on special order.”

“I maintain that you did me a great favour,” Marlene said smugly.

“ _I_ maintain that if you want to be snogging Matthew Shirley, you shouldn’t be snogging Sirius Black, no matter how pretty his compliments.”

“Sirius Black is good fun and he never has any expectations,” Marlene said. “Matthew was beside himself with jealously and all but admitted he should have asked me when he had the chance. I’m hoping that means his head is on straight and he’ll ask me to the first Slug Club meeting of the term.”

Lily shook her head.

“Why don’t you ask him to something?” she suggested. “If he’s all but admitted he likes you it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

“Not a chance,” Marlene said. “I have a personal policy.”

“But not a boyfriend,” teased Lily.

“Back me up here, Gwyn.”

“Sorry, can’t,” she said, climbing into bed. “If I didn’t do the asking I’d’ve never had a single date to an event.”

“Seriously? What is the world coming to?”

Gwyn listened to Marlene and Lily argue about progress and tradition with half and ear as she took the three potions that were sitting on her bedside table and eased back into the pillows.

She was tired, she could admit it. After being well-rested for a half second the wave of exhaustion towed her directly into sleep before she could even think to _nox_ the lamp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing the marauders, Lily and Marlene was incredibly difficult and if you all could let me know how the character interactions turned out I'd appreciate the feedback
> 
> hope you are all continuing to enjoy!

**Author's Note:**

> I decided the fandom needs more Marauders Era time travel. I remember it being so prevalent when I was writing Harry Prewett over on ffn.net and I can't believe there are so few f!Harry/Sirius fics in this wonderful archive. 
> 
> It's been a while since I've done this so feedback would be nice!


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